Effect of Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) concentration in the gas feed on Carbon Dioxide Absorption Performance using Aqueous Potassium Carbonate promoted with Glycine

CO 2 Research Centre(CO2RES),Chemical Engineering Department, Institute Contaminant Management (ICM) Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 32610 Seri Iskandar Perak, Malaysia

Abstract

This paper presented the effect of CO₂ concentration in the gas feed to the CO₂ absorption performance using a green solvent, potassium carbonate promoted with glycine (PCGLY). Recently, the performance of this solvent (with precipitates) was hindered by its poor mass transfer performance due to the blockage in packings and piping. Therefore, this study focused to study the CO2 absorption performance of non-precipitating potassium carbonate promoted with glycine. This green solvent contains aqueous blend of 15wt% potassium carbonate and 3 wt% glycine. The absorption performance of the solvent was obtained by demonstrated a few experimental works using a bench scale packed absorption column. The packing type was Sulzer metal gauze and the column consisted of six sampling point which located equidistance along the packing.The effect of CO2 concentration at the gas feed was assessed in term of its CO2 removal efficiency and concentration profile along the packing. The study shows the decreasing trend of CO2 removal as CO2 inlet concentration in the gas feed increases. The reason of this behavior is due to the limited reactant of liquid phase to absorb high CO₂ concentration in gas phase. The main outcome of this study demonstrated the efficient absorption which can absorb up to 79.24 % of CO₂ from natural gas using non-precipitated PCGLY.